STEVE CORONELLA: Hub upbringing comes out tops in Mother’s Day memoir

Here in Ireland misery-laden memoirs remain popular 20 years after the publication of “Angela’s Ashes,” Frank McCourt’s best-selling depiction of his difficult Limerick childhood.

With Mother’s Day just around the corner, I figure it’s my turn to have a go at this lucrative genre. Unfortunately, the deeper I delve into my suburban Boston upbringing, the clearer the truth becomes: my formative years were unspeakably…ordinary.

No matter how hard I try to conjure up scenes that a publisher might find sufficiently harrowing, the fact is that my parents always behaved like well-adjusted adults whose primary concern was the welfare of their family.

It’s unlikely I’ll ever recover from such an unmarketable childhood.

I should have done something about it years ago, maybe insisted that our comfortable home include a small measure of squalor and neglect, but who knew? Coming of age in an Irish-Italian household in 1970s Medford, I figured there’d be plenty to moan about later.

I was wrong.

If only “Angela’s Ashes” had been around when I was growing up, to counsel me in the ways of the miserable memoir. The tips are all there on the opening page. In a single paragraph we’re told that “the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.” And: “Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

But it gets better. After an impressive roll call of supporting players – pompous priests, bullying schoolmasters, a shiftless alcoholic father and a pious defeated mother – comes this marvelous summing up: “Above all – we were wet.”

Despite my raw material being significantly less wretched, I’ve decided to mark Mother’s Day by tackling the memoir. So with Mr. McCourt in mind and my poetic license ready for inspection, I present a short account of my early Medford years.

* * *

When I was young, school was a torment fully endorsed by my uncaring parents so they might get on with the trivial business of running a home and earning a living. The daily walk to our neighborhood school – covering all of four breathless blocks – taxed our little bodies almost beyond endurance.

As for the building itself – the defunct Dame Elementary, now used by Tufts University office staff – how could we be expected to learn in classrooms that openly mocked us by featuring our own rudimentary work pinned to the walls?

Every afternoon after my brother and I had staggered home, my mother would ask about our day and then insist we have a snack. If we found nothing to our liking, she’d whip us…up anything we wanted. (Our family movies document another distressing truth: As soon as he got home from work, my father also beat us – at basketball on the flagstone patio court in our backyard.)

Most days in the fall and winter we’d head out with our friends before it got too dark. For a couple of hours we’d engage in an archaic suburban game called street hockey, which involved simulated fisticuffs that sometimes got out of hand. Just as it did with our heroes, the Big, Bad Bruins over at the Garden.

In the spring and summer our hardship took another shape. Then, it was the endless monotony of punch ball and relievio and “outs” against someone’s front steps.

I remember one day disaster struck. I was maybe 9 or 10. Two friends were playing pitcher-catcher – with our front steps as a backstop and using a hard ball – when a wild throw rode up the hand railing and smashed our porch window.

Everyone ran for cover except me. It was my house. Where else was I going to go? So I had to do the explaining.

Frank McCourt may have had it rough in Limerick all those years ago, but growing up in 1970s suburban Boston was no picnic either.

Medford native Steve Coronella has lived in Ireland since 1992. This essay is taken from his new book, “Entering Medford – And Other Destinations,” available from the Amazon Kindle Store.